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Since I actually LIVE with Eskimoan people (mostly Yup'ik, Chup'ik, and Inupiaq) I can say with certainty that the book as outlined is bullsh**.

Arctic people in North America use fossil fuel and modern technology as much as anyone else on the continent, excluding Amish and Mennonites. They drive snowmachines which exude huge clouds of exhaust, unless they have newer 4-stroke models; the boats are equipped with 110-horsepower Yamaha and Mercury motors; homes are usually heated with diesel fuel; and the kids, whom I teach, are fully technological with IPods, CD players, MySpace accounts, and the ubiquitous PlayStation or XBox. Those who live in smaller villages don't have cars because there are few roads; those of us in the larger towns all drive cars. It is true we do hunt - with rifles, scopes, a GPS to guide us, and a freezer to store the food.

The book, at least as presented here, is the high point of demeaning racism. Arctic people are some kind of hunter-gatherer remnant living, no doubt, "in harmony" with nature while worshipping the "old ways." The fact is that there are more pagans among the Americans and Canadians who have moved there in the past few decades than there are among indigenous people. In our village, most of the Native people go to the Catholic church. Sorry, no nature goddesses. Only a bigot could look at a modern Native person and imagine that they are some mystical nature-worshipping ur-human.

Thanks for letting me rant. Nothing pisses me off more than liberal racism. It reminds me of what I've read about the attitudes of southern whites during Jim Crow - "those blacks are simple people." Eskimos deserve a lot more respect than they're getting from this book.